Tag Archive: evil

As this Thanksgiving holiday nears, we are exhorted to be thankful for the blessings we have. But how can we be thankful when we see and face so much unfairness and evil in life? Can we understand this crazy world, let alone be thankful?

Reading Maus, a serious comic about the Holocaust, and watching the famous, based-on-life WWII miniseries Band of Brothers brought similar feelings to me. The Holocaust suddenly wasn’t just a word, but a real horror done by unspeakably evil men to normal people. This evil haunted me for hours as I walked outside in the beauty of a woodland’s autumn morning, my mind unable to concentrate on normal activities because I just couldn’t stop thinking of those Jews. Some had their skulls crushed in the gas chambers as they piled against the doorway, trying in vain to get out. Others broke their fingers climbing the walls. As I walked numbed in the horror, I felt both thankfulness and humility.

Why thankfulness? Because the problems in my life suddenly seemed vaporously trivial in comparison. The disagreements, discomforts – all seemed like nothing. How can I complain in anything? My grandparents were soon coming up, and we were worried that we did not have enough beds. My sister had suggested that the both of us sleep in our truck’s seats. The crazy idea suddenly became noble: Why worry about a slight inconvenience, when others have endured and survived so much more?

Why humility? I like to find a reason behind everything, and evil’s no exception. In history, the Holocaust actually had the effect of helping bring God’s people the Jews into Israel, their Promised Land, just as God had prophesied hundreds of years ago in the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures. He promised in Deuteronomy 30:2-3 that He would bring Israel back to the land even after they were scattered and persecuted throughout the world, and careful study of Ezekiel 4:3-6 shows that God prophesied 1948 as the date of Israel’s return (The Signature of God by Grant Jeffrey). God had turned around evil for good.

Yet despite these clear workings of God’s hand in the grand scheme, I strained to see His purposes within the microcosm of the concentration camps. Why were these Jews suffering so, so much, with no hope? The magnitude of this event hushed my mind into silent, awe-struck humbleness. Surely I cannot know the purposes of God in the ways of life. Life is so complex, so mysterious, it defies figuring out. I thought of the 6 billion people living life on this planet, in one year out of thousands of years in history, and I felt small. And awe-inspired.

How can I know what this is, this life? My life is short and insignificant. Who will know me when I am gone? Who will know I ever lived? I cannot even fathom what a billion people look like – the 6,000 stars visible to the naked eye are already too many for me to count. Yet all these billions have lives just like me. It suddenly felt breathtaking, to be so small and know so little. How little we know about life. What a mystery we live each day, not knowing what is happening a few feet away from us in the next house. Not knowing when we will die, who we will meet, or what lessons our lives will teach.

Someone may blame God for the evil that happens in life. But we are like children, and He is our Father. What does a child think when he is punished with time-out? When he is forced to do homework rather than play with his friends? Either the child will hate his father or trust that his father knows best, even when the child cannot understand why. How can the child know homework will help him prepare for college and for the workforce to raise a family, years beyond his present time? Such things seem too far away, yet they are in reality too wonderful for the child and beyond his comprehension. So it is with evil. Either you will hate God or trust Him despite not knowing every reason why. A God who can create the intricacies of DNA can certainly have a purpose for every evil, yet I do not know how He fashioned DNA nor how He will fix every wrong. I can only trust Him as a child trusts his father.

Yet even fathers have mercy on their children. Sometime after I read the horrors of the Holocaust in Maus, I watched an episode of Band of Brothers, “Why We Fight.” The Americans were occupying Germany in its waning days and wondering why they had their lives turned upside down just to fight these people. Comrades had died, wives back home grew cold, and lives were marred in disillusionment with the evils of war. Why where they here?

Yet a horrifying discovery in the forest answered their quest for meaning. A patrol found a concentration camp. Such things had only been rumors before, but now the full force of German evil became plain as the American soldiers stepped into a camp of pale, emaciated bodies barely grasping life within their barred prison rags. Lying on the ground were dead bodies so thin their skin outlined only a skeleton almost unrecognizable as human.

As the dazed Americans mingled among them, these gaunt figures reached out their hands and grasped a soldier’s sleeve, like the woman of old seeking healing with a touch of Jesus’ hem. One man brought his dead wife or daughter to the Americans’ feet. Another man saluted the soldiers. They gathered around the Americans like they were saviors. They were.

I cried. Suddenly I realized that these people were not hopelessly suffering – God was saving them. As the terror of the Holocaust spread across Europe, God was kicking Americans out of warm beds and comfortable lives. He was training them in war and sending them across an ocean to a land many had never seen, to save men, women, and children whom they had never met. Many died in combat without seeing the fruit of their objective, but whether they knew it or not, they were all saviors from the hand of God. Hundreds of death camps were liberated and the oppressed peoples of Europe were freed. That single Jewish salute implied so much to be thankful for.

As the credits rolled, I saw life anew. Life is like a movie we watch, an intricate weaving of plot and character two hours long. History threads through its actors small and great. Each of our lives is a 20-second snippet in the film, filled with good and bad, beauty and ugliness. Taken by itself, 20 seconds in a motion picture is nothing – we can hardly infer much about the plot or lesson. Some 20 seconds jolt you to recoil, while others overflow you with joy. Yet how can we judge a whole movie based on 20 seconds?

My life has been a pretty few seconds of comfort and beauty, of things and people I enjoy intimately. I’ve often asked myself why God made my life so beautiful, so wondrous. I know that others do not have the same experience; their 20 seconds are so much darker. And then there is life after death and life in the spiritual world – another realm of the story that is not visible in my 20 seconds. How can I know life when it’s only a tiny snapshot of a much longer reel?

Yet God has given us the synopsis for the movie – the inside scoop from the Producer Himself. The perfect story He has given in His Word, the Bible. He shows the main characters and the high points of the plot. He shows how evil works for good. And He has also stepped into the set of the story. He has become a man in the person of Jesus Christ, two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. He stepped in as the main character in this dramatic adventure and suffered the ultimate unfairness: unmerited execution of an innocent as a criminal. He was humiliated, tortured, and went through Hell – for us. He paid the punishment for our evils, for the daily Holocausts we pit against each other in our petty hatreds and jealousies and superiority-complexes. And then He rose from the dead to conquer death forever as a promise of our own resurrection. And for those who place their trust in Him as their true Father and Savior, He has promised a life after this life that cannot even be put into words:

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Without eternal life after death, life here does not make sense. Without Divine justice in the world to come, justice here fails to be fulfilled. Without Divine everlasting Love, love here fades away in death and time. Without the Word of God, our words and deeds fade away and come to naught. Without God, life is nothing: We are just dust wandering in the wind.

Yet we are not without these things. God is here. He brings sense to life, even when we cannot always understand Him. He is too wonderful to understand completely, like a stunning autumn storm that strikes breathtaking fear in our hearts and rains down blessings on our souls. Through Him, we can trust that our 20 seconds will be an indispensable piece of the two-hour show. We are part of His story. And that is something to be thankful for.

In the world, the beauty of God’s creation is too often clouded by the ugliness of man’s sins. We see liars, thieves, and murderers. We see greed and lust and anger. We see that all men err, that all men are unified in this ugliness called sin. But all men also are unified in the black root that causes sin. For each sin is uniquely apart of the greater whole of Sin; every facet of evil is cut from one motive, formed from one mold. Sins are, in the end, only ripples on the sea, each distinct from the other, and alive only because of that one water which feeds them all. That unifying deep is the one transgression that started all sin, that of pride.

In the beginning, God’s most treasured creation, His most beautiful work, was Lucifer, an angel “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty” and possessing the “seal of perfection.”1 Yet this perfect creation rebelled against his Creator, spurned Heaven for a land of his own making, and denied a role of subservience to one of false authority. He gave up his lovely wisdom and perfection to perform the wicked desires of his heart.

Pride threatens the ordinary individual to the most beautiful.

But why was this beautiful creature suddenly unafraid of the holy power he witnessed each day? Why did his perfect wisdom not tell him what he was doing was wrong? Why did he dare to rebel? Why was he not even grateful of the lofty position God had given him? God provides the answer: “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom by reason of your splendor.”2 Once Satan had convinced himself of his worth, he took it into his heart to “ascend to heaven,” to raise his throne “above the stars of God,” to become “like the Most High,”3 and was blinded to any reason or wisdom. Because he wanted a glory like that of God, he was obstinate, unfalteringly committed to the false belief he had formed to compliment his own desire. His fall could not have been caused by unbelief or ungratefulness, as some speculate, for why would he not believe if there was nothing in the circumstances of Heaven to make him doubt God? Why would he be ungrateful were he truly a humble servant before God?

Pride made Satan disregard all these rational thoughts. His lofty idea of himself, supposedly supported by his beauty in creation, made it possible for him to say “I can be like God; therefore, God cannot be all powerful. I am worth as much as God; therefore, why am I not given more?” Therefore, he became unbelieving and ungrateful. He became rebellious and bitter. Pride was the cause of all his other vices, the sprawling root of all his other poisonous fruits.

The door was now swung open: Satan grew envious of God’s creation, especially His special handiwork, man. He showed no guilt in deceiving Eve. He was only delighted in the murder of innocent saints of God. He did not hesitate to tempt the Lord Jesus Christ when He came into the world. Once he envisioned himself as worthy, Satan felt no guilt in indulging himself in pleasurable evils, for in Satan’s mind resides the thought: “I am worthy and deserve all things.”

But it is not only the head of evil who follows this degrading process. Fallen mankind often does the same. Pride is easy to accept, and natural to ourselves. And it is this same pride that is the root of every other wrong we do: A fornicator commits adultery because he believes the desires of his heart more worthy of fulfilling than moral law. A criminal breaks the law because he believes the greed in his soul is better gratified than suppressed for virtue’s sake. A murderer ends another’s life because he feels his own life and pleasure is worth more than his victim’s.

Even the littlest things find their source in pride. A petty argument is protracted because it has become a matter of pride to win. A grudge is held because the resented cannot let the worth of his heart go unavenged. Jealousy and envy arise from thinking that we are worth that beautiful thing; why is it then not ours? Snobbiness emerges from the belief that one is superior, above the ordinary man. Even gluttony and laziness arise from pride – albeit in the most subtle ways – for in these we place our pleasures above our responsibilities to our bodies and our circumstances.

Thus it is how fallen man has become like its “father, the devil.”4 Like the great adversary, the wicked man has followed his heart, journeyed into the place where he believes only himself must be pleased, and have, as a result, found the land where God’s storms shall soon thunder. Like the first rebel, these souls have placed their desires above that of God and virtue; they have then fallen into every other evil their heart could concoct.

But if pride is the door to other crimes, then it is humility that lays out before us the golden path to God. For if we are truly humble, we cannot think ourselves as worthy of sinful indulgence. We would use our time wisely, for others and God. Humbled, we would be awed by God’s sheer existence, and deeply gratified by His flood of grace. Humbled, we could never think of displeasing Someone greater than ourselves. With true humility, all the outgrowths of pride would never be.

But true humility is difficult; it is unnatural. That is why only through God can we achieve any hope of meekness. Only through Jesus Christ can we grow in selfless love and kindness, because it was He Who performed the greatest work of humility – He laid down His life for creatures below Him; He died for man and brought the shining gift of salvation to those who did not deserve it. Only through Jesus Christ can we defeat the decaying force of arrogance. And so it is only through Him must we place our sinful hearts so that we might achieve true humility in the eyes of God.

A dim-lit room is occupied by two men: Joshua in a bed, facing the audience, and Thomas standing by his side. A window in the upper left of the room has its shades open, but clouds cover the sunlight. Overcast light shadows the room.

Joshua(weakly): I know it’s been a long time, son.

When the dark reveals the light

Thomas: Yeah, Dad.

Joshua: But I’m glad you’re here, now; it’ll make me feel better.

Thomas: Let’s not talk about it. Happy times.

Joshua: I understand, son. But—

Thomas: Like the reunion at Jim’s. Or—

Joshua: Thomas.

Thomas: Dad.

Joshua: Thomas. (pause) Thomas, I know it’s uncomfortable. I know we’ve never wanted to talk about it. And I understand that. It’s just . . . I’m not going to be seeing you.

Thomas: Do you really want to talk about—

Joshua: Yes, Thomas. Yes, before it’s too late. I want you to understand something. I want you to know the peace I’ve—

Thomas: I know where you’re going with this. Please, Dad, I want this to be happy. Let’s not go there.

Joshua: I understand. (pause) Thomas, I’m going to do something to spare you pain later.

Thomas: What—?

Joshua: Remember your grandfather?

Thomas: Well, uh, yeah. Yeah I remember Gramps.

Joshua: He died in our house, you know. I was there.

Thomas: And how does this relate to, to what you said?

Joshua: Patience, son. Well, Father – you’re grandfather – I was with him in his last moments. You could never see so much agony. Because he was unsure – he didn’t know where he was going.

Thomas: Dad, stop.

Joshua: He wanted to believe. He wanted peace. But something kept bothering him. He couldn’t give his heart to God not knowing how to answer the pain in his life, the evil in the world, the suffering. (pause) And I know you think the same way.

Thomas: Dad, stop it.

Joshua: That’s why you’ve never wanted to come up after your mother died. Maybe that’s why you joined that group in the hills. Maybe that’s what’s giving you pain. With the divorce. . .

Thomas: Please, Dad, I’ve got my own life.

Joshua: Maybe, but you haven’t got your own happiness; you haven’t got your own hope. You haven’t got your own peace and love inside.

Thomas(quietly): Dad?

Joshua: Son, I understand what you’ve been through. I walked down your road when my father died. I cursed God, just as I’m sure you have. How could He take him from me, I asked. How could He be good if He did that.

Thomas(quietly): God doesn’t care.

Joshua(coughs): That’s what I said.

Thomas: But what’s left? I didn’t know what to do. Clara brought me to the Society. I wanted it to fill me, but it didn’t. But God didn’t care. What could I do? Where could I go? The world is empty. Dad, what’s the answer? How could God do that? You said you’re at peace— How? How could you when the world is nothing, all evil?

Joshua: Son, Thomas, I know the answer. God knows the answer. We just must listen. I was angry at God because I didn’t stop and let Him tell me His point of view. I was just thinking of my position. (coughs, then continues exasperatedly) Son, let me tell you. No, let God tell you. (He takes a thin Bible from under his bed covers and taps it lightly.) We pass judgment on God without letting Him take the stand. But He tells us why. He wants us to know. That’s why His testimony is everywhere – in this Book.

(coughs hard. Thomas holds his jerking body.)

Thank you, Thomas.

Thomas: But how can God explain it?

Joshua: Thomas, I am ill, only because I know what is health. The blind from birth cannot understand vision because they have never experienced it. Son, God does the same. How can we know love and good and beauty if we are not given pain and evil and ugliness? We cannot know the light without the dark. We cannot find the truth without there being lies for us to avoid.

Thomas: Why didn’t He make us all perfect to begin with?

Joshua: He couldn’t. God’s people would be blind then. They could not appreciate His great goodness without knowing the abhorrent evil that is not Him. Even the angels, unknown to sin, must be shown the panorama of mankind, in order to learn the evil of the other side, and the beauty, holiness, and grace of God.

Thomas: What about good people? Why are they punished?

Joshua: We are all children, even the men and women who know the truth of evil. We sometimes go wrong, forget the blackness of the mortal world, lose faith in God, maybe forget about Him and begin trusting ourselves. God is like a parent – our Father. He teaches us through circumstances. He wakes us up with pain. Happy times don’t get us thinking; hard times do. Maybe we need a slap in the face, to get us thinking about the eternal things, not mortal ones. We need a reminder of the unworthiness of the world and the worldly; we need a reminder that God is the only One we must depend on, the only One who gives us peace and hope. (coughs hard) You see, son, God knows everything. He knows us. Oh, He knows us all too well. He knows we are doubtful, that we question Him. He knows our hearts, our fear of Him, often our hate of Him and His watching of our personal evils. He knows that if He didn’t allow evil people to demonstrate that evilness, we would never understand His punishment of their hearts. We would never understand His justice against that blackness in the world. We would never understand the holiness that is required of coming to Him. (inhales deeply and reaches feebly for a glass on the dresser)

Thomas(quietly): But why mother?

Joshua (holding Thomas’s hand tightly): Thomas, it’s very hard, but we all need to experience evil. We all need to feel the power that it possessed in a world against God. Through our closest losses, we know that no one is separate from sin, that sin is what takes us all away. But such a loss is also an example to us; we understand just a little of the sacrifice of God for us – sending His only Son, the closest One to Him, to die for us. We can grasp the greatness of His love to die for someone who is not even worthy of salvation. We know at last that, though sin kills, there is Someone Who is greater than sin, Someone Who has led that powerful evil captive.

(Joshua coughs hard. Light begins to emerge from the window. Thomas looks down from Joshua’s eyes.) Son, God told Ezekiel and Paul that we shouldn’t ask God for explanations of the evil in this world. But even still, God tells us. God wants us to know Him, but He also wants us to know ourselves, too, that we are bad, in our very hearts. Even the most holy men recognize their unworthiness in the face of the great goodness of God. But God has chosen a portion of the wicked clay to mold into vessels of glory for Himself. He knows that we could never understand His eternal plans; we are mortal. But God never does something without a cause, even the evils, He tells Ezekiel. He provides us reasons for the things we can’t understand. He gave us a Book; He gave us His Word; He gave us His Son. Don’t ignore it, son. You can believe in God and in the sacrifice He made to set us free.

(He grasps his son’s hand.)

Thomas, believe.

Thomas (looking into Joshua’s eyes): Dad.

(The light from the window becomes brighter. A warm smile breaks over Joshua’s face. Then, as he is looking in his son’s eyes, the focus leaves his own. He stares softly, with a smile, into his son’s face.)

Thomas: Dad? (looks closer) Dad? (touches Joshua’s face) Dad, it’s not— not when you’ve just— Dad, (kneels beside bed, arms around Joshua) not when I can now see, now know. (looks up into brightening light and down to his father) God, forgive me. Dad. Oh, Lord. Father.

(The curtains move slightly; the light brightens around the bed, around the thin Bible near Joshua’s hand. Thomas pulls the Bible closer to him; it slides from under Joshua’s hand.)

Almost nothing else pervades the world so deeply. Everywhere man travels, and everywhere he looks, he finds them. They wrestle inside his inner being and often reign victorious. From storm and sickness to lying and murder, they are the smear upon a glorious creation.

Why is there evil and suffering? And why would a loving, righteous, just God allow such terrible things? Men have long pondered over this paradox. Every religion has had to deal with the problem. It has caused some to assert that a loving God cannot exist at all. A few even deny the very existence of suffering and sin, claiming that reality is just a dream. But, when one reads the mayhem in the news, and sees the pain and wickedness in life, their existence is very real, and the soul longs for an answer.

The Bible is the place to look. Part of the explanation is right in the first book, Genesis. It records that after the Creation, mankind was tempted in the Garden of Eden by Satan, and they disobeyed God. As a consequence, God cursed mankind and all Creation. Death entered the world. Floods, storms, and droughts became natural occurrences. Thistles and weeds flourished in the once-perfect earth, and man had to toil in the ground for his bread.

This harsh world was actually necessary for sinful man. In Genesis 1:28, the Lord commanded Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” But now that man was fallen, how could he subdue the perfect earth? Thus the creation had to come under the Curse as well. Also, now that man was sinful, God made him toil and sweat just to get food so that man would not have so much free time to sin. The curse of work is actually beneficial to man, keeping him from slothful wickedness.

But, why did God permit the possibility of disobedience in the first place? If God knows all things and is all-powerful, why did He create man with the ability to rebel? And why was Satan allowed in the Garden? Why was Satan permitted to continue existing after he fell away, or why was he even created? Obviously, the Lord allowed the entrance of evil for a purpose.

Romans 9 gives an enlightening and piercing discourse pertaining to evil and God’s right to be God.

15) For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” 16) So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 17) For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” 18) So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.

So the purpose of Pharaoh’s life is to disobey God and try to prevent God’s people from leaving Egypt, so that the Lord may show His power through His miracles. God used Pharaoh’s sin for His glory, and He actually hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh, through his sin nature, would choose to disobey! This concept is at first quite unbelievable, even offensive for many. Paul, the author of Romans, senses his readers’ rejection right away, and so answers:

19) You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20) On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this?,” will it? 21) Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? 22) What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23) And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, 24) even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.

Notice how Paul responds. He immediately rebukes accusing man for questioning God, for man is nothing. According to Romans, we are of the same clay lump, and God, the Potter, has mercy to shape a few of these clumps into glorious vessels for His enjoyment and the rest for dishonorable use. Do the clay have a right to tell the Potter what to make them into?

If the Lord wants “to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known,” why did He not just destroy evil when it sprung up? Why has the earth dragged on for thousands of years in sin? God has been so “slow” because He wants His chosen ones to know His great mercy and patience toward the wicked. Even though they deserve instant and eternal punishment, He yet waits until the appointed time of judgment, after all His elect have believed.

Pastor S. Lewis Johnson, in “The Goodness of God and the Existence of Evil,” states, “The Bible says simply, I think this, that God’s self-manifestation is the highest good.” He says that since the glory of God is the greatest good, then the ultimate, supreme purpose of all things is to glorify Him in all His attributes. For what other reason where all things created for? Johnson continues:

His mercy cannot be known if there are not some people who are miserable. And His grace cannot be known if there are not some people who are in sin. And His justice cannot be known if there are not men who are under condemnation. And so He has permitted sin in order that He might be perfectly glorified in all of His attributes, inclusive of His mercy and His grace.

The knowledge of God is eternal life. It is for men the highest good and so, consequentially, He must give us the knowledge of Himself. And that demanded sin, condemnation, and judgment. But He is good, and even this works for His good.

It is necessary that the Lord show all His attributes, and not just some. God is not one dimension. Yes, He is love, but He is also holy, just, righteous, almighty, all-knowing, wise, etc. He displays His love to His chosen ones, but His righteousness demands that justice be carried out. He is so, so holy, set apart, and incorruptible that He cannot tolerate sin, at all.

What better purpose can life have, but to glorify the Creator? Even the angels are watching us, seeing the display of the attributes of God that they never would have known without the entrance of evil.

This concept is so difficult for human minds to grasp. But we must remember, that we are just the little ants who try to understand Einstein’s mind. Is it possible that we, as mere dust, will understand the almighty, all-knowing God?

But for the mind repulsed by the thought that God would allow people to suffer for His glory, think of this: when Christ died on the cross, He bore the punishment for the sins of man. Each of our eternal punishments was laid upon God. He had to bear the greatest suffering of all. No pain of any man can compare to His pain on the cross. And so when people demand to know why God allows evil and suffering to happen to man, they are asking the wrong question. They should ask, “Why did God allow His Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer for wicked men?” For we were His enemies, and yet He died for us. He suffered more than anyone and everyone; God allowed Himself to suffer the greatest humiliation. Why? Because He loved us before the beginning of time. He chose us to be saved before the foundation of the world, so that we may see His glory, and worship the only One worthy to be worshiped. And is it not worth all the evil and suffering of the world to show such love and glory? As Paul declared, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Romans 8:18.

Note: Information from the New American Standard Bible and from pastor S. Lewis Johnson’s Systematic Theology, Part 1: Theology Proper, “The Goodness of God and the Existence of Evil.”